JUDAS PRIEST's IAN HILL: 'The Internet Is Good And Evil In Equal Measures'

JUDAS PRIEST bassist Ian Hill was interviewed at Hungary's Fezen festival on July 29. You can now watch the chat below.

Asked if the the advent of the Internet and social media has made the marketing of music more complicated for a band like JUDAS PRIEST, Hill said: "It definitely makes it more complicated. Of course, yeah, I mean, there's all different factions to take account now. The Internet, with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, all these different facets, you have to cater to all of them, really. So that makes it a little bit more complicated."

He continued: "The Internet is good and evil in equal measures. As soon as you have a product to offer, it's instantly available to anybody with a computer — it's just that simple. It's also instantly available to anybody who wants to steal it off one of the pirate sites. So, like I say, it's good and bad."

Hill added: "When we first started out, you had a record player, and that was it. And you anticipated your favorite band's album coming out; you waited for weeks for it. And you went to a record store, grabbed it, rushed home with it and put it on your little mono record player, and away it went. These days, obviously, the media is endless and the business has changed to that same degree as well."

Asked what he thinks PRIEST's greatest contribution to heavy metal has been, Hill said: "Probably [the fact that] we've kept at it. I mean, in the '70s, in the mid-'70s, or the late '70s, a lot of the established bands sort of pulled up there; they stopped. [LED] ZEPPELIN stopped, [BLACK] SABBATH stopped touring, DEEP PURPLE stopped touring, and there was only really us that carried the flag there for about five years. And after that, the new wave of metal came along — you know, [IRON] MAIDEN, [DEF] LEPPARD, AC/DC, if you like, although they'd probably been going as long as we have — and it got a bit of momentum. And that was a time of punk rock as well, and everybody was sort of afraid that punk rock was gonna take over and kill metal dead. But we carried on, and that was probably one of our greatest [contributions] — we kept on when everybody else… I mean, they didn't stop for any other reason; they probably wanted a rest. They'd been going for a long time then. So, yeah, that's probably it."

JUDAS PRIEST is continuing to tour in support of its latest album, "Redeemer Of Souls", which was released in July 2014. The follow-up to 2008's double-disc concept album "Nostradamus" was billed as a return to JUDAS PRIEST's heavy-metal roots.

"Redeemer Of Souls" sold around 32,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 6 on The Billboard 200 chart.